Literary criticism is often treated as a secondary act, the intellectual afterimage of the work it addresses. This seminar proceeds from the opposite premise: criticism can be understood as a compositional art, a practice that gathers elements from different media, genres, and historical moments in order to propose a world in which the work might live. The critic does not merely interpret but constructs, weaving together forms, narratives and temporalities to re-situate a work within a newly configured cultural space, animated by the critical desire to imagine and construct more just and inhabitable worlds. 

NeMLA 2026 will be held in Pittsburgh, PA from March 5-8.

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

We invite contributions for the next volume of our series, Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature. This volume is dedicated to exploring feminist perspectives in literature and culture, providing a platform for work that highlights the diverse ways feminism continues to shape literary scholarship.

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

We are delighted to invite contributions for the upcoming third volume of our book series, Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature. This volume turns its focus to postcolonial approaches in literary studies, bringing together scholarship that explores the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of literature shaped by colonial encounters and their legacies.

At a time when any strides that may have been made towards reproductive rights have been thrown into serious question, motherhood—its lived reality, its spectre, and its implications for theory—remains a fraught and undertheorized field. As Adrienne Rich put it in 1976, “we know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood”—and this statement continues to be true nearly fifty years later despite the proliferation of media, both fictional and nonfictional, that takes motherhood as its object. The very definition of “motherhood” continues to be contested even as its boundaries expand and encompass an increasing number of subject positions and relational modes.

Panel Title: Queer Gothic as Resistance: Subverted Classed and Gendered Binaries in 21st-Century Fiction

Conference: Queer–Class Relations Conference

Dates: April 17–18, 2026

Venue: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York City

Presentation Mode: Online

Panel Chair: Faham Zeeshan (fahamzeeshan82@gmail.com)

Co-Chair & Convener: Dr. Muhammad Numan (UMT, Lahore) (muhammad.nauman@umt.edu.pk / nauman.sa18@gmail.com)

Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Bureaucratic Modernism

Edited by Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster

Both modernist literature and modern bureaucracy reshaped how societies imagined authority, individuality, and the written word. Modernist authors not only depicted bureaucracy—they absorbed and transformed its textual forms, procedural rhythms, and rationalized aesthetics. This volume takes that convergence as its starting point, asking how the rise of administrative culture in the early twentieth century influenced modernist style, and how modernist experimentation in turn reframed the experience of bureaucracy.

Translation Networks in the Decolonising World, 1950s–1970s
King's College, University of Cambridge | 24–25 April 2026

Note: All abstracts must be submitted through the Annual Meeting and Membership portal at  https://www.xcdsystem.com/asecs/member/

You do not need to be a member to submit an abstract through the portal; however, you must be a member of ASECS to present at the conference. The panel chair cannot submit the abstract on your behalf.

With the increasing popularity of game studies, academic departments are striving to accommodate potential students. This panel is designed for participants to share their approaches to teaching game studies, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. This will be in roundtable format, and participants are encouraged to bring materials (syllabi, course packets, other media). A multiplicity of approaches is welcome, whether participants teach in game design, critical studies, or pedagogy/rhetoric.

To participate, submit a syllabus for a course you have taught recently or are about to teach in academic year 2025-2026. Also, note that this proposed panel needs to be approved in October by the Program Committee.

Remembering the Middle Ages: Memories of the Medieval Across Time and Space (Roundtable) (Hybrid)

61st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 14 May, through Saturday, 16 May, 2026

Co-sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Arthurian Society-North American Branch, International Association for Robin Hood Studies

Co-organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College; Siân Echard, University of British Columbia; and Alexander L. Kaufman, Ball State University

Planet LangLit 2026: International Conference on Language, Literature and Cultural Studies

Theme: Language, Literature, Education and Ecology for Planetary Justice & Inclusive Future

Date & Venue: 15 – 16 January, 2026 |

Hybrid |Green University of Bangladesh, Dhaka,
Bangladesh

Pioneering Bangladesh’s Language and Literary Conference with Global Impact!
Do you want your research to shape the future of language, literature, culture, and the planet?

Planet LangLit 2026 is your chance to break boundaries and connect with researchers from around the globe.

For the first time in Bangladesh, an international conference is offering publication opportunities in four globally renowned outlets:

The 97th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 6, through Saturday, November, 8, 2025, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

Call for Manuscripts, Study & Scrutiny, Volume 8

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: DECEMBER 15, 2025

CLIMATE, JUSTICE, AND YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: CENTERING INTERDISCIPLINARY CLIMATE LITERACY LEARNING

Call for PapersWorkshop: Black Presence and Influence in Europe Before the Atlantic Slavery21.–22. January 2026 | Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society, Leuphana University Lüneburg

The Medieval Foremothers Society invites proposals for two hybrid sessions honoring Sharon Kinoshita (UC Santa Cruz) at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI in May 2026. Each year the Medieval Foremothers Society honors a scholar whose scholarship, teaching, and activism have laid foundations and built networks for modern medieval studies. Sharon Kinoshita is our 2026 Foremother because of her innovative research that cuts across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, which foregrounds crucial developments in postcolonial medieval studies, Mediterranean Studies, and the Global Middle Ages.

For an edited volume on "Datafied Decision-Making", we invite scholars at different career stages to submit short abstracts (400-500 words) from the disciplines of political science, law, sociology, environmental studies, science and technology studies, critical data studies and related fields that offer a critical perspective on the ethical, legal and societal consequences of algorithms and data practices.

More information on the call can be found here. 

The 2026 American Studies Association of Norway Conference looks back to its early years for inspiration. The very first themed ASANOR seminar was titled “The Bicentennial of the US Constitution.” Many years later we return to this document, not only to revisit its cultural and historical significance but also to ask what it means to invoke the Constitution now, in a time of intensifying democratic crisis and rising illiberalism. From the expansion of executive power to attacks on voting rights, judicial independence, and press freedoms, many of the traditional pillars of U.S. liberal democracy are under threat. However, illiberalism is not new to the American experience.

Book Chapters on Severance for Edited Collection on Neoliberalism and Affect in Twenty-First Century Culture  contact email: neoliberalismandaffect@gmail.com 

“We’re people, not parts of people. Even with what little they gave us these are our lives. no one gets to just turn you off” - (Severance, S1.8)

The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, Department of French, Hispanic, Italian Studies (FHIS)

November 20th – 21st, 2025 

The Silence of Forgetting: Absence, Void, and Memory in Literature and Culture Graduate Conference 

                      Gendered Bodies and Digital Selfhood in Short-form Videos: Research from the Global South

                                                             CFP for  Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies

 CFP: Rhetoric and/as Academic Leadership  Leadership in academia is by nature a fraught enterprise for which few faculty find themselves adequately trained. Such work is made even more difficult in our current climate due to the shifting socioeconomic conditions of higher education that ask more of leaders while at the same time providing fewer material and structural resources to help them lead. As a result, many faculty are more reticent than ever to seek out or accept leadership positions, especially at the highly visible executive levels such as university presidencies, where political or personal failure comes at a high price.